Introduction

Many people’s introduction to the Boxer uprising and the siege of the
foreign legations in Peking was, traditionally, Peter Fleming’s The Siege at Peking (1959).It was certainly mine, and it aroused more
than passing interest:not only was I
then living in Hong Kong (1987-1997) and, from 1991, travelling frequently to
Beijing, but I was already starting to research the history of Western women
and their relations with China and the Chinese.[1]

Fleming’s account, readable as it may be, has more than one obvious
flaw:it neither tells the story of what
the foreign women experienced, nor uses the records they left – prompting my
title, ‘Silence of the Sources:Women
at the Siege of the Legations 1900’.

What makes Fleming’s account doubly frustrating for the researcher into
women’s experience or, indeed, into the broader picture, is that he missed an
almost miraculous opportunity regarding source material.He acknowledges the 1950s help of Stella
Macdonald, the British Minister’s daughter, three years old at the time of the
siege;of Mrs Poole, widow of FG Poole
who, with hisbrother, was also
besieged;and of Violet Garnons Williams
(neè Tours), aged sixteen months in June 1900.

Following the publication of his book, however, he received a letter
from Vienna, from Paula von Rosthorn, wife of the Austrian Chargé during the
siege, and known to many who chose to stay in the more vulnerable French and
German Legations and members of the relief force, as the ‘Good Fairy of the
Defence’.To compound his failure to
track down all survivors, he did not then go and interview her, nor ascertain
where her papers, and those of her husband, were, for the future use of
scholars.He was even too discreet to
follow up his unanswered reply to her letter, in which he had written,

What
I wanted to ask you was the immediate cause of you leaving the British

Legation.It is so long since I worked on the book
that I cannot remember the details,
but I do know that one or two sources indicated that you and your husband were involved in some kind of
incident.[2]

The disagreement alluded to can be seen as
integral to the split between the British Legation, in which most of the
foreigners were besieged, and the French and German Legations and the Peking
Hotel, from where the ‘opposition’ sniped not only at the Chinese besiegers, but
also, metaphorically, at the British, and the American missionaries.This bad blood was a feature of international
relations in China which, in turn, governed foreign relations with the Chinese.Paula von Rosthorn did not die until 1967.

The
problem was, keen and intelligent though he was, and knowledgeable from
personal experience about aspects of China, he was not committed long term to
his subject.[3]He even turned down the chance, offered to
him after the publication of his book by the publishers Constable, to read the
siege manuscript (which they had already rejected) of Lucy Ker, wife ofWilliam Ker, Assistant Chinese Secretaryat the British Legation.[4]Lucy Ker lived on, in England, until 1969.

In
his reply to Paula von Rosthorn, Fleming named the survivors known to him, but
there were other women more important as oral sources:Maud von Ketteler, widow of the assassinated
German minister, who did not die until 1960, and the American missionary Bessie
Ewing who died in 1966.

As late as 1999, I held the hand of, and talked toHelen Hope Brazier Steedman, who had been six
months old at the start of the siege, the daughter of (James) Russell Brazier (
Chief Secretary in the Imperial Maritime Customs) and Helen Brazier (neé
Myers).Mrs Steedman, who died the day
of her hundredth birthday, 17 December 1999, could not be expected to remember
the siege, nor could she tell me anything she had been told, for her mother
died in childbirth and from the effects of the siege in January 1902, and her
father rarely mentioned the siege when she was old enough to comprehend what
her family had been through;their
sufffering, and his wife’s untimely death, were no doubt as much factors as
customary reticence.I will come to how
I found Mrs Steedman and subsequent research success shortly.But, first, my title needs to be set more
firmly in a text.

To
do so highlights a point which, although so obvious, always needs to be borne
in mind when recreating the past:‘It is
dangerous to draw conclusions either way from the silence of the sources which
happen to have survived.’[5]That stands on its head Paula von Rosthorn’s
comment to Fleming, ‘It seems quite a miracle to me that you, who have not
taken part in the siege personally, have been able to conjure so vivid a
picture of the situation, so unbiased and true.’[6]What Fleming in fact wrote, in ignoring both
the women’s story and their sources, was not only sadly biased, but also
one-eyed;his work has become valuable
only as a prod and a stepping stone.

Having taken up this challenge, I plan now to show the rough workings of
our craft – the mechanics of hunting down the sources;and they are more easily told anecdotally
and rather personally (though I hope nonetheless scholarly for that).

What drives the personal involvement is not
just the thrill of the hunt, of fitting jigsaw pieces together;I am also haunted by the image conjured up by
Virginia Woolf:‘Those unlit corridors
of history where the figures of generations of women are so dimly, so fitfully
lit.’[7]

In response, not only do I strive, where possible, to make my historical
work both accessible to general readers and scholars and in other ways
practical but I find, too, that, in the search for sources, I become immersed
in a network of relations with family members and others appealed to for
help.Yet another aspect of writing
women’s history in a previous neglected area – foreign women in, to begin with
Hongkong and Macau, later China – is the satisfaction of finding gold coins in
often hitherto unturned soil, and of supplying answers to questions concerning
the bigger picture which have previously proved elusive.

But recreating women’s history full time also has its drawbacks:it is, for instance, a great conversation stopper.After a pause, a new acquaintance will ask,
‘How do you do your research?’or,
‘Where do you get your material?’They
suspect that material and information are not as readily available about women
as about men.[8]I propose, now, therefore, to elaborate on
the hunt I undertook for previously neglected material on foreign women’s part
in the siege of Peking.

Fleming Papers

Since Peter Fleming was the spark, it seemed natural to search first for
his papers, but, as Fleming himself was dead, how was I to go about it?I had earlier written about him in his own
right;I had, therefore, not only copies
of his travel writing (much of it about China), but also a biography by Duff
Hart-Davis.[9]His was an uncommon enough name to track
down;he put me onto Fleming’s son who
told me that his father’s papers were at Reading University and gave me
permission to use them.(On his death
I corresponded with his sister).

I
had not expected the treasure trove that awaited me:dozens of letters, following the publication
of his book, from family members of survivors of the siege, each with a snippet
to tell, very often about women, including the letter from Paula von Rosthorn,
the one about Lucy Ker’s manuscript, and a correspondence with Stella Macdonald
and several others about Fleming’s suggestion that Lady Macdonald took part in
looting following the Relief.Since
looting, and women’s alleged part in it, was so important an area of research,
this was gold dust indeed.

Violet and Ada
Tours

Meanwhile, I had begun to follow another thread of my research –
tracking down papers through bibliographies, footnotes and
acknowledgements.Fleming gave no hint
of the whereabouts of Violet Garnons Williams (daughter of BG Tours, British
Legation accountant, and his wife Ada (neé Harwood) whose diary he had used
only for the epigraph to a chapter).But PD Coates, author of The China
Consuls (1988) also mentioned Ada’s diary, and we shared a publisher.

Coates was delightfully receptive to a research letter of 29 December
1988 (the first in my files).To look
back at such a correspondence is, itself, to relive history.So generous was Coates, that he had already
done his best, through his own longstanding contacts, to track down Stella
Macdonald for me.He had not earlier
tried to find the family on his own account because, as he explained, ‘I made a
rule not to approach families for help if I saw that I was going to criticise a
member of the family concerned...’[10]
– a noble rule, but I usually find out that I am going to criticise after I
have contacted the family and seen the papers.That can be tricky.As for Violet Garnons Williams, Coates was
sure that he had seen a notice of her death, and that of her husband, in The Times.

A
two-pronged attack sent a letter back to him asking where he had seen Ada
Tours’ diary some years before – perhaps the new owners of the house could pass
a letter on to surviving family -anda delve into Who’s Who (which, together with Who Was Who, the DNB, Burke’s and Debrett’s
are essential tools for British research, worth having, as far as possible, on
one’s own shelves and used to feed into each other).At the same time as I discovered there a
brother-in-law of Violet, PD Coates wrote back with a Welsh address.On the telephone Basil Garnons Williams told
me that his niece, Violet’s daughter, still lived in the family house and she
later provided not only the diary but also photographs, hospitality and a
friendship that has lasted twelve years.PD Coates and I were prevented from meeting for a good gossip about the
China Coast only by my absence abroad and, then, his death.

Lucy Ker

The hunt for Lucy Ker’s manuscript took eleven years;indeed, I had finished the last draft of my
own manuscript before I found it.Constable’s chief executive, whohad been there thirty years, arrived shortly after Fleming was offered,
and refused, a look at Lucy Ker’s manuscript, and there was no institutional
memory.I even wrote to John Murray, in
case he, too, had been offered the manuscript and could give me a lead.Lucy Ker, though married to an English
consular official, was a Canadian and her father’s name and place were in her
husband’s Who Was Who’s entry.A letter to the University of New Brunswick,
in case her father’s papers and a copy of her manuscript were there, was
equally unsuccessful.

Then, one evening, I arrived at the Foreign Office in London for the
launch of a book about Far East embassies, and got talking to a woman as we
hung up our coats.Later, I found
myself beside her and asked why she had been invited.‘Oh, my grandmother was besieged in Peking,’
she replied.Quick swallow from
me:‘What was her name?’‘Lucy Ker’.The rest, as they say, is history.

But, in addition to having her grandmother’s manuscript in her bottom
drawer, Kate Ker had more to offer.Some days after I visited her, she rang to apologise for forgettingsomething important:a neighbour was a descendant of Paula von
Rosthorn.

Paula von Rosthorn

In
1992, I had sent a letter to Paula’s 1960 address in Vienna, hoping her family
still lived there;not surprisingly,
there was no reply.In 1998, through an
Australian diplomat friend previously posted in Vienna, I had written to an
Austrian diplomat who introduced me to the State Archives.They had no von Rosthorn papers, but they did
tell me of a recently published book, in German, incorporating the siege
accounts of both von Rosthorns.The
British Library had the book, but I wanted a copy of my own.It was still in print, but I do not read
German.Another friend was doing a
master’s degree in Oxford with a German-Korean woman;she agreed to read the book for me (as a
labour of love;I’m an independent
scholar with no institutional funding), and later dictated to me in English the
relevant passages.By happy chance, her
next port of study was Vienna and there she tracked down the author of the book
who was also in charge of the von Rosthorn archives.[11]To her, and later to me on the telephone, he
told some of the stories behind the text.Then Kate Ker’s neighbour secured for me a von Rosthorn family tree that
allowed many jigsaw pieces to find their place.

The Brazier Family

My
search for Russell and Helen Brazier, their children (one of whom was Helen
Hope Brazier Steedman), his sister Daisy Brazier and her sister Annie Myers was
almost as long and convoluted.Surely
such a large besieged family had left a record.I even wrote to an MP called Brazier in the
hopes that he was related;he regretted
that he was not.Then, one afternoon,
almost exactly two years ago, and here in the Brunei Gallery, tea was being
served at the AGM of the Friends of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic
Society.I got talking to someone who
had once written seeking a research answer from me.

I
told him whose papers I was still looking for, and he remembered something
about a contact at Sothebys telling him about the medals of the Brazier family
(medals were his special interest).I
wrote to the man at Sothebys;he wrote
to Russell and Helen Brazier’s granddaughter (by this time, her mother, baby at
the siege, was in a retirement home), and she rang me.When next I was in East Sussex, I called on
99 year old Helen Steedmanwith her
daughter who had also thoughtfully brought along a small siege cannon ball- in a Harrods bag;it was heavy enough to break the handle and
reeked of history.

Now, the extended family was prompted to search the house and there,
lying forgotten for decades, they discovered Annie Myers’ siege diary.Not only that but

bound with it were several articles.One, typically self-deprecating, was by
(Lady) Ethel Macdonald.(An account of
her, referred to in the Fleming correspondence, that had eluded me through
various Japanese leads in England was found eventuallyin a memorial service programme among papers
in an Overseas Nursing Association file I had once opened idly, while waiting
for papers to come up, in Rhodes House, Oxford. Such successes come under the
heading ‘serendipity’, and are an essential research tool.But it does make you wonder what you have
missed.)

Another article was a most disappointing one by Julia Bredon, in spite
of her later admired writing about Peking, and one that told me that Paula von
Rosthorn was pregnant and almost on her way back to Austria when she had
intimations of trouble and returned to her husband’s side in Peking;no other source confirms this, and she had no
living children.The most welcome
article was ‘Besieged at Peking’ by the artist Cecile Payen for I had searched
for years by correspondence for a book of thattitle, once spotted in a bibliography, having failed to find it in the
Bodleian or the British Library.

American Missionaries

Cecile Payen was an American, and, because
of the proliferation of US missionary societies, so were many of the foreign
women in China.The possible richness
of their records was hinted at when Jane Elliot, another participant at this conference,
rang me many years ago and generously – given that she discovered that we were
both working in the same field - told me about the diary of Theodora
Inglis.Through Theodora’s papers I
learnt that she had lost a baby daughter during the siege, one of the seven
foreign babies to die;[12]another, a week after the siege, was Lucy
Ker’s.

But it was the bibliography of Paul Cohen’s History in Three Keys (1997) that really allowed me to get to grips
with women missionary sources in US universities.Even approaching a family, through the
university concerned, for permission to quote led to an earlier, and still
relevant diary ofSara Goodrich in her
granddaughter’s care.Without Cohen’s
preparatory digging, my search would have been much more onerous.

Annie Chamot

I
found US libraries endlessly helpful once we were in email contact, sending
vast wadges of photocopied material at fees that varied considerably.Public libraries in places where American
women might have left papers were also useful, but there you have to do your own
digging.San Francisco yielded several
articles about Annie Chamot, the valiant American wife of the Peking Hotel’s
Swiss proprietor.Although I have still
found no personal papers, I did find the Chamots’ country house at Tomales
Bay,Marin County, and the local people,
including the newspaper’s librarian, were ready to help.I still keep an ear and an eye open for
Annie’s siege letters home, but fear that the 1906 earthquake may have buried
them in rubble, as it did the Chamots’ fortune of property and Chinese
artefacts gained partly through siege loot.

Maud von Ketteler

The luckless Clemens von Ketteler’s wife,
Maud (neè Ledyard), came from Detroit and, once I had negotiated with a
researcher from its public library’s recommended list, I came by not too bad a
haul.And, from the State Archives in
Munster, his home town, came some articles about his death and an account of
his life by a former valet.A letter
to Federico Fellini – whose autobiographical film Tea with Mussolini was based on episodes in 1930s and wartime
Florence, where Maud von Ketteler lived in a German government villa until the
war - went unanswered and was the only letter I did not follow up.I do not usually take no reply for an
answer.

Charlotte Brent

Many
of the besieged foreign women were young and resilient;Charlotte Brent was not only a mother with
adult children, but had also gone to Peking to stay with her son for a nervous
debility.A hint of her existence came
in a letter from a Brent Hutton Williams to Fleming of 19 June 1959.‘I have,’ he wrote, ‘a great many siege of
Peking papers and articles in my possession, including my grandmother’s diary
which was written at the time.’It took
me some years to find those papers too.Finally, noting that AD Brent (Charlotte’s son) worked for the Hongkong
and Shanghai Bank in Peking, I wrote to the Bank’s archivist in Hong Kong – she
had for years been unfailingly responsive to research queries.She sent my letter to her opposite number in
London who wrote to me giving the address of Hutton Williams’s widow.It was her son who replied and now held the
papers which not only included his great grandmother’s diary, but also, as I
discovered later, when I came upon Annie Myers’ diary, an anonymous article
published by her.I had guessed, by a
process of elimination, that she was the author;now, by comparing the texts, I had
proof.Charlotte Brent came safely
through the siege, but her husband felt, as his own biographical paper shows,
that her death in 1921 was hastened by the experience.

Among those papers, too, was an example of the siege medal specially
struck for all those who had undergone the ordeal together.Several of the women, mainlyBritish, also received the Royal Red Cross
medal for service in the Siege Hospital;I saw Daisy Brazier’s at Sotheby’s where it was being appraised.

British Missionaries

The siege letters of British missionaries,
such as the London Missionary Society doctor Lillie Saville (one of seven
doctors who acted as nurses in the siege hospital), and Georgina Smith, are
safely stored here at SOAS in the Special Collections.It took some time to find the the United
Society for the Propagationof the
Gospel papers at Rhodes House, Oxford, because of their change of name.

Non-English Speaking Sources

I tracked down sufficient British and
American material to satisfy me;French
and Italian impressions depended on published first hand, male accounts, apart
from some dates from the Italian Ministry for Foreign Affairs.I was sorry not to find any diaries or
letters of women (apart from the published Pei-t’ang siege diary of Sister
Hélène de Jaurias).I am conscious, too,
of the lack of both Japanese and Russian material.The Japanese military attaché left an account,
sifted for me by a Japanese research scholar, which only once mentioned the
Legation women but at least gave their names.Other approaches to institutions in Britain and Japan proved
unsuccessful.A neighbour’s Russian
student went through an unrewarding secondary source Russian text;repeated letters to the Russian Red Cross,
which might have provided a lead, went unanswered.The malicious diary of the Australian Peking
correspondent of The Times, George
Morrison, which Fleming had found in Sydney when his own manuscript was
complete, gave me some typically nasty information about the Russian siege
singer Mme Pokotilova – I have still to find out her true background.

Chinese Women

By now it will undoubtedly have been
noticed that I have not mentioned Chinese women.There were hundreds of refugees within the
legation area, many injured and bereaved, and their situation throughout the 55
day siege was parlous as a result of attack, disease and starvation.Including a full account of their experience
has proved difficult for two reasons:first, I do not read or speak Chinese;second, it would appear from Western scholarship with access to Chinese
sources, for example Paul Cohen’s, that there is a dearth of women’s written
records.

I
have, however, managed to create some sense of their plight from women
missionary accounts, in particular, Luella Miner’s attempt to record oral
history from among the hundred or so schoolgirls in their care.In a similar way, I have created a narrative
about the Red Lantern Sisters – the women’s arm of the Boxers.

There was another moment of serendipity, this time with a Chinese
family, one caught up in the related siege of Tientsin.Two stalwarts of that siege, who only missed
the siege in Peking through illness, were Lou Henry Hoover and Herbert Hoover,
later President of the United States.Their papers came to light through Cohen’s bibliography, as did those of
their friend Anna Drew.

Hoover’s published memoirs tell the story of the night a shell fell on
the shelter of the family of Tong Shao-yi, Director of Railways, and later
Prime Minister in the Republican government.Hoover, hearing the explosion nearby, rushed to help his neighbours.Tong Shao-yi’s wife and baby were dead but
the rest, including a young girl, Tong Pao-yue, were carried to the Hoovers’
house.Years later in Washington,
Hoover met Madame Wellington Koo (grown-up Tong Pao-yue) by then wife of the
Chinese Minister to the United States, and she reminded him of that night.

I
recognised that name because Tong Pao-yue’s granddaughter, Dr Linda Koo, was my
friend in Hong Kong and I had already written about the family, mainly through
the third Madame Wellington Koo.[13]Linda was now in New York and consultation
with an aunt produced family details and photographs.So often in research, connectionsare all important, and previous writing is
rarely emphemeral.

As for the Empress Dowager, the trail is much muddied but I have made
some effort to draw a plausible picture of her actions and motives,
particularly where foreign diplomatic wives were concerned.This attempt may not meet with acceptance,
but I felt it an angle worth exploring.

Biographical Details

There were 149 foreign women - diplomatic
and officials’ wives, missionary doctors, teachers and wives, ‘globe-trotters’,
wives (and one mother) of bankers , railway engineers, and tradesmen and their
79 children.I have succeeded in
identifying the majority of them – this required perhaps the most
time-consuming research, picking up the odd name and date here and there and
making something of them.Annie Myers’
and Daisy Brazier’s dates, for example, came from different members of the
family going to find their graves.I
hope that the resulting biographical details can be regarded as a resource for
others.I hope, too, that my decision
to let the women speak, where possible, for themselves through their
long-neglected records can be regarded in the same way.

Conclusion

What I wanted to do, through my book, Women at the Siege, Peking 1900 (2000), was to change the
perception of the besieged foreign women as an undifferentiated mass, parasites
of imperial aggression, a nuisance or an inspiration to the men having to
defend them.I have not sought to judge
them;that would have been invidious for
someone who has not only,perhaps, got
too close to them but who, herself, comes from a colonial background.My intention was to give them a due that
historical writing and use of sources have previously ignored. At least these sources are now less silent.

Notes

The bibliography that follows these
notes is taken from Women at the Siege,
Peking 1900;works that are not
cited there are cited in full in the notes.

[1] The result has been:The Private Life of Old Hong Kong
(1991);Chinese Footprints (1996);The Taking of Hong Kong (1999);Women
at the Siege, Peking 1900 (2000) .

Anon, 'The Siege of Peking, a
Narrative from Day to Day: An Englishman's Diary' (A.D. Brent?); 'With the
Experiences of an American Missionary, and a Lady' (Annie Myers?) reprinted
from the North China Daily (Shanghai,
1900).

Carl, Katherine, With
the Empress Dowager of China (London, KPI, 1986; first published 1906).

Chamberlain, WJ., Ordered
to China: Letters... Written from China while under Commission from the New
York 'Sun' during the Boxer Uprising of 1900 and the International
Complications that Followed (New York, Stokes, 1903).

Chung, Sue Fawn, 'The Much Maligned Empress Dowager:
A Revisionist Study of the Empress Dowager Tz'u-hsi in the Period 1898 to 1900'
(unpublished doctorate, University of California, Berkeley, 20 December 1975);
and an article in Modern Asian Studies, 13,
2 (1979) (Cambridge University Press).